Monday, April 8, 2013

Testing @ MySQL

MySQL has always given great emphasis on quality. This
has got even better in the last few years with increased
investment in the dedicated test team. The Server test team
tripled in size during 5.6 development and all 5.6 features
have undergone thorough testing at the hands of the QA team.

I have more than 15 years experience in this
industry and have worked on different products and
technologies as part of test and development teams. Compared
to most others I find the developers in MySQL very involved in
testing. Here the developers are expected to write functional
tests for their features and bug fixes. This is how it was
historically and this continues today in spite of the bigger
test team. This model has the following advantages

Code is in reasonably good shape when delivered to test team

Testers
can focus on more complex tests since the straightforward
tests will be written by the developers

Listed below are some of the focus areas of the
dedicated test team

Integration
tests – Tests to check how the feature works when it
interacts with other features like views, triggers, stored
procedures , partitioning etc

Replication

Backup using mysqldump

Concurrency
testing

Exploratory
testing

Bug
hunting cycles for finding crashes and result differences

Upgrade/Downgrade

Non functional tests like performance, stress, longevity etc

In my next post I will explain in detail about
the processfor
qualifying new features